Future
Navigating toward the best of all possible futures. Follow along as Singularity Hub discusses the future and latest trends in futurology.
Programming Self-Driving Cars Makes People Less Selfish
Self-driving cars are just around the corner, but working out the rules that should govern them is proving tricky. Should they mimic often self-interested human decision making, or be programmed to consider the greater...
Can the Sustainable Development Goals Be Measured by Satellite?
In 2015 the UN established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be met by 2030. From universal access to clean water and education to gender equality and strong institutions, achieving the SDGs would mean...
Black Mirror’s ‘Bandersnatch’ Takes Viewers on a Wild Interactive Ride
When was the last time you watched a movie where you could control the plot?
Bandersnatch is the first interactive film in the sci fi anthology series Black Mirror. Written by series creator Charlie Brooker...
The Verge’s ‘Better Worlds’ Sci Fi Series Launches Today
When you picture what the world will look like in 10, 20, or 50 years, what comes to mind? Most people probably envision a scenario that’s drastically positive or negative—a utopia or, more likely,...
The Milestones of Human Progress We Reached in 2018
When you look back at 2018, do you see a good or a bad year? Chances are, your perception of the year involves fixating on all the global and personal challenges it brought. In...
Nvidia’s Fake Faces Are a Masterpiece—But Have Deeper Implications
‘Don’t believe everything you see on the internet’ is pretty standard advice, but it’s getting harder than ever to distinguish the real from the fake. A new algorithm from Nvidia could muddy the waters...
Eating, Hacked: When Tech Took Over Food
In 2018, Uber and Google logged all our visits to restaurants. Doordash, Just Eat, and Deliveroo could predict what food we were going to order tomorrow. Amazon and Alibaba could anticipate how many yogurts...
Saving the Seas: New Technologies to Protect the Ocean
The ocean covers more than 70 percent of our planet’s surface. The Pacific alone is more than 60 million square miles. And yet, technologists are often focused on their home turf, populating roads with...
Whale-Watching from Space: Why Satellites Are Monitoring Wildlife
A new study of whales shows that advances in satellite imagery and related technologies mean we can now recognize specific features of animals all the way from space. It is the latest in a...
The Promise—and Complications—of Domestic Robots
Every year, for just a few days in a major city, a small team of roboticists get to live the dream: ordering around their own personal robot butlers. In carefully-constructed replicas of a restaurant...
Britain Is Developing an AI-Powered Predictive Policing System
The tantalizing prospect of predicting crime before it happens has got law enforcement agencies excited about AI. Most efforts so far have focused on forecasting where and when crime will happen, but now British...
Inspired by Sci-Fi, an Airplane With No Moving Parts and a Blue Ionic Glow
Since their invention more than 100 years ago, airplanes have been moved through the air by the spinning surfaces of propellers or turbines. But watching science fiction movies like the Star Wars, Star Trek,...
Digital Authoritarianism Is Rising. Here’s What That Means
The internet has long been touted as a force for freedom that can topple dictatorships around the world. But according to a new report on digital freedom, authoritarian forces are clawing back control and...
It’s Time For an Airport Security Tech Upgrade
We’re in the midst of one of the busiest weeks of the year for air travel, with 30.6 million passengers expected to fly on US airlines in the days leading up to and following...
Follow the Data? Investigative Journalism in the Age of Algorithms
You probably have a picture of a typical investigative journalist in your head. Dogged, persistent, he digs through paper trails by day and talks to secret sources in abandoned parking lots by night. After...
The Fascinating, Creepy New Research in Human Hibernation for Space Travel
No interstellar travel movie is complete without hibernators. From Prometheus to Passengers, we’ve watched protagonists awaken in hibernation pods, rebooting their fragile physiology from a prolonged state of suspended animation—a violent process that usually...
Our Voting System Is Hackable. Here’s How to Secure It
The November 6, 2018 midterm elections are being widely regarded as a referendum on President Trump, but they will also serve another, less obvious purpose. The integrity of our election infrastructure is being tested....
NASA Wants to Send Humans to Venus. Here’s Why That’s a Brilliant Idea
Popular science fiction of the early 20th century depicted Venus as some kind of wonderland of pleasantly warm temperatures, forests, swamps and even dinosaurs. In 1950, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History...
Will Tech Make Insurance Obsolete in the Future?
We profit from it, we fear it, and we find it impossibly hard to quantify: risk.
While not the sexiest of industries, insurance can be a life-saving protector, pooling everyone’s premiums to safeguard against some of...
Could Tech Make Government As We Know It Irrelevant?
Governments are one of the last strongholds of an undigitized, linear sector of humanity, and they are falling behind fast. Apart from their struggle to keep up with private sector digitization, federal governments are...
The Rise of Dataism: A Threat to Freedom or a Scientific Revolution?
What would happen if we made all of our data public—everything from wearables monitoring our biometrics, all the way to smartphones monitoring our location, our social media activity, and even our internet search history?
Would...
Outdated Evolution: Updating Our Governments to Cope with Disruptive Technology
What happens when evolution shapes an animal for tribes of 150 primitive individuals living in a chaotic jungle, and then suddenly that animal finds itself living with millions of others in an engineered metropolis,...
What Would It Take to Build a Tower as High as Outer Space?
The human desire to create ever bigger and more impressive structures is insatiable. The pyramids of Ancient Egypt, the Great Wall of China, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—now the tallest edifice in the...
Why the Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think
People have no idea how fast the world is changing.
So said Peter Diamandis to the audience at Singularity University’s Global Summit, taking place this week in San Francisco. Diamandis believes the convergence of multiple...
China Is Building a Fleet of Autonomous AI-Powered Submarines. Here Are the Details
A fleet of autonomous, AI-powered submarines is headed into hotly-contested Asian waterways. The vehicles will belong to the Chinese armed forces, and their mission capabilities are likely to raise concerned eyebrows in surrounding countries.
According...
AI Can Help Create a Better World—If We Build it Right
Society is rife with fears about the future of AI. For some, like Richard Branson and Ray Dalio, it’s AI’s exacerbation of the wealth gap and the looming social crisis it could bring about....
Could Machine Learning Mean the End of Understanding in Science?
Much to the chagrin of summer party planners, weather is a notoriously chaotic system. Small changes in precipitation, temperature, humidity, wind speed or direction, etc. can balloon into an entirely new set of conditions...
Graphene and Beyond: The Astonishing Properties and Promise of 2D Materials
Since graphene was first isolated in 2004, a Nobel Prize-winning feat that sparked a whole new exciting field of materials science research, 2D materials have had all kinds of suggested applications. Now, at the...
This Mind-Controlled Robotic Limb Lets You Multitask With Three Arms
If you’ve ever juggled a situation where two arms aren’t enough, you’re in luck! Thanks to a new study published in Science Robotics, humans have the ability to mind-control a robotic arm on a...
How Technology Is Helping Close the Gender Gap and Empower Women
Gender inequality is not an issue that only affects women. When half of the human population is denied their full potential, the world as a whole is at an enormous disadvantage. Despite an increase...
From Here to Human-Level Artificial General Intelligence in Four (Not All That) Simple Steps
In the 15 years since I first introduced the term "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), the AI field has advanced tremendously. We now have self-driving cars, automated face recognition and image captioning, machine translation and...
Is the Rise of AI on Wall Street for Better or Worse?
May 6, 2010, is a date that should live in infamy. On that day, the US stock market suffered a trillion-dollar collapse. Do you remember it?
In just 15 minutes from 2:45 pm, the Dow...
Why Most of Us Fail to Grasp Coming Exponential Gains in AI
By now, most of us are familiar with Moore’s Law, the famous maxim that the development of computing power follows an exponential curve, doubling in price-performance (that is, speed per unit cost) every 18...
The Earth’s Carrying Capacity for Human Life Is Not Fixed
In a recent Nature Sustainability paper, a team of scientists concluded that the Earth can sustain, at most, only 7 billion people at subsistence levels of consumption (and this June saw us at 7.6...
Traditional Advertising Is Soon to Be History. Here’s What Will Replace It
This year (2018), the global advertising industry is projected to surpass $550 billion. Advertising revenues have driven Google’s valuation to >$700 billion, and Facebook to >$500 billion. All of that is about to change.
What...
New DNA Synthesis Method Could Soon Build a Genome in a Day
Synthetic biologists are the computer programmers of biology. Their code? DNA.
The whole enterprise sounds fantastical: you insert new snippets of DNA code—in the form of a chain of A, T, C, G letters—into an...
Laws of Flight: As Drones Take Off, Regulation Lags
In 2014, a drone got tangled in the power lines outside a South Carolina prison carrying a small payload of marijuana and a cellphone. Police arrested a man in a nearby campsite who’d been...
New Evidence That the World Really Is Getting Better
If you allow your perception of humanity to be shaped by the news, it is easy to lose sight of the narrative of human progress. Struggling democracies, suicide epidemics, climate change, and acts of...
Are Electric Planes the Future of Aviation?
Last week saw a rather unusual flight plan. Norway’s Transport Minister and the CEO of its major airport operator, Avinor, flew a quick lap around Oslo’s airport in a tiny two-person plane. Unremarkable—except that...
The Smart Road Tech That’s Making Driving Faster, Safer, And Just Better
From autonomous cars to flying taxis to electric-powered aircraft, technological innovations in transportation vehicles seem to be moving faster than Elon Musk’s express loop underneath Chicago. But when it comes to regular roads and...
Video Gamers May Soon Be Paid More Than Top Pro Athletes
Your interest in sports may have started out as a hobby when you were just a kid. You were better at it than others, and some even said you were gifted. Maybe you had...
How Will Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War?
As technology has progressed, humans have become ever more powerful. With this power comes great opportunity and great risk. Nowhere is this clearer than in the potential of artificial intelligence. But a new report...
Is It Moral to Seek Immortality? A Discussion at the Vatican
Earlier this month, I participated in a discussion/debate at the Vatican on the topic of “The Morality of Immortality.”
The discussion was moderated by CNN medical anchor Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and included Rabbi Dr. Edward...
5 Organizations Using Cool Tech Solutions and Research to Clean Up the Oceans
The Earth is an ocean world. From space, this fact is obvious, whether the planet appears as a bluish dust mote at the edge of the solar system, a bright sapphire star from our...
Holograms Can Now Program Brain Activity—Are Fake Experiences Next?
Optogenetics, neuroscience’s hottest mind-control tool, just got a major update.
Projecting 3D-light holograms—yes, holograms!—directly onto a mouse’s cortex, engineers at UC Berkeley instantaneously gained control of dozens of neurons at once.
That’s not the impressive part....
Will Europe’s Looming Tech Rules Prove to Be a Template for the World?
There was a time when people bought most of the software on their computer, but this is, of course, now ancient history. Some software you still buy, but much of today’s most-used software is...
Stuff 3.0: The Era of Programmable Matter
It’s the end of a long day in your apartment in the early 2040s. You decide your work is done for the day, stand up from your desk, and yawn. “Time for a film!”...
Tech Optimists See a Golden Future—Let’s Talk About How We’ll Get There
Technology evangelists dream about a future where we’re all liberated from the more mundane aspects of our jobs by artificial intelligence. Other futurists go further, imagining AI will enable us to become superhuman, enhancing...
Robot Cities: Three Urban Prototypes for Future Living
Before I started working on real-world robots, I wrote about their fictional and historical ancestors. This isn’t so far removed from what I do now. In factories, labs, and of course science fiction, imaginary...
How Will Merging Minds and Machines Change Our Conscious Experience?
One of the most exciting and frightening outcomes of technological advancement is the potential to merge our minds with machines. If achieved, this would profoundly boost our cognitive capabilities. More importantly, however, it could...
